"Oh that's so cool!" squeaks Papenna. "Is there any mana here, can you tell?"

"I'm not great at it, but I can try ... "

Hel focuses on their surroundings, trying to feel for something that's as ubiquitous as air but has a spark of energy and life in it.

This is a planet that has life on it!

"Yeah, there's mana here! Which is a good thing, because I need that to survive long term."

"Oh, good, I'm sure the scientists would have tried their hardest but it's better that we have everything you need to survive," says Kato.

"I appreciate it! It's not as dense as in the Underground, but it's there." She glances out the window of the car. "... How much longer until we get where we're going?"

"The house is a little out of the way, because we needed one where you'd be able to get from the car to the house without being seen, you'd attract a lot of stares if we put you in a rowhouse downtown. It should be another..." Kato looks at his pocket everything. "Seven to ten minutes."

Hel nods. "That makes sense, I don't want to cause a problem. Am I going to have to stay in the house all the time?"

"We can probably figure something out if you want to go somewhere else, but it's much easier to secure the house."

"I would like to be able to go outside, but there's nowhere I'd really like to go. If there's a yard or a garden, that would be fine."

"There's a yard. I'll ask the experts if the fence is tall enough and the trees cover enough. Is there much of an outside, in the underground?" says Kato.

"Sort of. It's all underground, obviously, so there's nowhere that you can see the sky. But there are parts where the cavern's ceiling is high enough that it feels a lot more open - especially in Waterfall."

"There's an underground river with a falls?" says Papenna. "That sounds beautiful - wait, how do you light the place, is it all electric, what do you use to generate your juice -"

"Almost there," says Kato, as the car pauses at a fence and the gate swings open.

Hel looks out the window to get a view of what she assumes is going to be her home for the foreseeable future.

It's a three story house, shadowed by a few big old trees, accompanied by more younger trees, and encircled by a privacy fence overgrown with various ivy and climbing flora. Helvetica has no fingers on the pulse of Amentan architectural movements, and it's in good repair, so it would be hard to guess the place's age, though the tree closest to the house has had a lot of time to recover from the prunings that kept it from growing straight through the attic. The car pulls up in front of the veranda and the doors pop open for them.

That ... is the biggest house she has ever seen. She's a bit awestruck. She gets out of the car to follow Kato and Papenna again. 

"I hope you find it comfortable - and not too empty, in the past I think this particular house has mostly been used for entire diplomatic parties, but it's suitable for this occasion because it's nice and private," says Kato, tapping his everything on the front door to make it unlock. "If you wind up finding it lonesome I'm sure no small number of scientists would be happy to stay the night in one of the rooms you don't pick for yourself, but no obligation, that's just what I think of first if I imagine what I'd need to want to sleep here. The kitchen should be stocked already..." He turns right to hit the kitchen, which proves to have various foods in it when he checks cabinets and the fridge.

She looks through the cabinets over his shoulder, getting an idea of what kind of food is available.

"I'm sure I'll be comfortable - I'm used to a lot ... less than this. Like, a lot less. It would be nice to have other people around. I can deal with it but I don't really like being alone."

"I'll stay if you want!" volunteers Papenna. "I'm mostly a linguist but I can do generalist green-ing."

The cabinets contain pickled vegetables that are hard to identify specifically, pasta, rice, flour, beans, cooking oil, spice mixes with names like "Southeastern Fryup" and "Fish Breakfast", peanut butter though the picture of a peanut on the label isn't quite right, bottled juices, condiments like ketchup and chutney, a couple kinds of crackers, something called Seed Snacks in Garlic Amazement Flavor, and canned not-quite-pineapple and canned some-kind-of-pepper-in-molasses-sauce. The fridge has cherries, except that they're green, and a stack of vacuum-sealed steaks of various kinds, and a quart of milk and a box of eggs and a few microwaveable complete meals of various sorts and butter and a plastic bowl of ready-to-mix salad greens.

 "Of course! It would be nice to at least sort-of-know someone. What do you mean by 'green-ing'?"

She grabs a couple of the cherries, which look the best to her at the moment, then looks around for a bin to put the pits in.

Kato reveals the trashcan by kicking a cupboard which slides out to reveal the existence of a trash bin.

"Oh, I guess we haven't explained castes yet!" says Papenna. "Amentans have a few different castes, and you'll be able to tell who's who by the - oh, do you have full color vision, like do all the parts of a rainbow look distinct to you -"

"Thanks," she says to Kato.

To Papenna she says. "Yeah. Or ... blue to red. I can't see ultraviolet or infrared, but everything between those is visible."

She bites into one of the cherries, separating the fruit from the pit.

"We can't see those either. So, red orange yellow blue green purple? And my hair looks green to you, right, and so does the cherry?"

The cherry has two pits for some reason but it's pretty tasty.

"Yep!"

She happily eats more cherries.

"These're good!"

"Oh good! We didn't know what you liked so I think they just got a variety of stabs in the dark... anyway, castes, I'm a green, and we're the caste that does academic work and professional art and music. Kato's a blue, they do diplomacy and governance and things like that."